problem booting from disc

hi can you please help, after installing updates the other day i could not boot up keep getting disc error no system disc insert disc and press any key so i put the win 7 dvd in and hit enter i then get loading windows files but instead of the blue bow saying install, repair etc. it goes straight to starting windows but the coloured balls that float in to make up the windows logo do not appear i have tried the hard drive in another computer and it boots up any suggestions?

spec
3g pentium 4
2.5g ram
512g geforce 8600gs
160g seagate sata drive

Double check your boot order in the bios.

the boot order is cd, hard drive, floppy. but i tried putting hd first but still no joy. since then i put the hard drive back in another computer and it showed up as being partitioned one partition had 149gb and was empty the other had was the remainder and was showing 98 meg used space but there were no files showing so i got it to show system files and that was all that was in the partition but i could not access the file, so i set it up to have control of the file but still could not get access to it. so thinking it could be a virus or something i tried to format the partition using the format option of windows 7 but after formatting the partition it still showed the system file, so i used disc manager to see the partitions on the disc, the partition with the system file in it was showing in a black border and the other partition was in green, i clicked off to see if i could hind out what the colours meant and when i looked at disc manager again the black box and partition were not showing only the 149gb green section? so i did a fresh install of windows 7 and the computer it was in recognised my hard drive on start up and asked me to select the operating system i wanted to use if i chose either my hard drive or my aunts the system booted up with no problems but both showed my hard drive as being 149gb. yet the hard drive will not boot in my is system so i wonder if the other partition is still there and my computer is seeing the hidden partition first and that is what's causing the problem as bios still picks up the hard drive as 160gb, and im still getting the same problem where if i boot from cd the windows files load but then i get windows starting in stead of the option to install windows or repair the computer, just gets stuck at windows starting as it did before.

i finally got my computer to let me select safe mode etc which starts to run some time sit gets stuck at loaded: \windows\system32\drivers\disk.sys and some times i get blue screen saying *** stop: 0x0000005c (0x00003000,0x00000001,0x00000008,0x00000000) what dose this mean?


just tried again got to black screen saying safe mode in the corners and microsoft (r) windows (r) (build 7600)
after ages i got the install or repair option so i selected the automatic repair option and got repairs complete restart computer so i did i then got loading windows files and starting windows i now have blue screen with laves and white bird showing but i dont have the bit where i enter my password to log in showing?

now trying fresh install from options will let you know how i get on.

ok seems to be fine now reinstalled ok doing updates at the mo hopefully it will be fine now

The stop 0x0000005c is the HAL failing to initialize. Do you know if there are any bios updates for the machine. I'm hoping as your reinstalling that will do the trick

ok i managed to get it to let me into the options to boot from safe mode after many attempts did auto fix option when it rebooted it was beeping like mad so i started removing ram one by one in case that was the problem and after each time i restarted the comp, it turns out that after i removed one of the ram cards it let me do an install and now it is fine the ram card must have failed. thanks for the help.

Glad to hear your up and running